Utopian.io Weekly - [October 19 2018] - New Partner, New COO, New Tasks!

This was quite a week for us at Utopian, with a new partnership, a witness upgrade, another new hire, some amazing task requests, and another huge episode of our radio show. Let’s catch up.

In this post:

Welcoming Rocket.Chat to VIPO
Big witness update
Welcoming @Suesa
Big Tasks, Big TRs
Build Utopian.io v2 with us!
Our radio show is back!

Welcoming Rocket.Chat to VIPO

For the second week in a row, we have a huge addition to our VIPO (Very Important Project Owners) club: Rocket.Chat. As covered in the announcement, they are a fast-growing communication and collaboration platform that is now installed on over 180k servers and counts over 10m users worldwide as well as having an active, passionate community of over 700 developer-contributors who help Rocket.Chat’s core team of developers to constantly improve the product.

Big witness update

As covered in this announcement post, We’ve recently upgraded our server’s hardware. As part of the upgrade, our main and backup servers are located in different countries with different providers in an effort to decentralise and remove single points of failure. We also doubled the RAM on the production server. The biggest news in regards to the Utopian-io witness is that we finally have a seed node at seed.utopian.io:2001. This is something we’ve wanted to do for some time, and we are very glad to have it up and running.

Welcoming @Suesa

This was also announced in the big witness announcement post, but it deserves its own headline here: We have a new COO! @Suesa isn’t just a future mad scientist, she is a Steem powerhouse who comes to us from @steemstem. During her trial period, she has already added order and discipline and a whole bunch of Jira tasks. That’s what happens when you put the self proclaimed “scary German” in charge. We love you, @Suesa!

Big Tasks, Big TRs

We’ve had a couple of huge task requests this week. @lemouth’s incredibly ambitious idea of running a full particle physics research project on Steem is starting to take shape with a TR about Managing particle physics model information in Python. The second one, from @surpassinggoogle, is for ulogs.org, and is about creating a bot which can vote and comment but shaped for communities. Click the links for all the info!

Build Utopian.io v2 with us!

As you probably know, our development team has been hard at work in creating the base for the next Utopian.io, with features and functionalities requested by the community. If you’re a developer and want to help, visit our repo and take a look.

Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show on MSP Waves

We had another huge, huge, huge radio show this week. Following up on last week’s addition of an Anti-abuse category to Utopian, we hosted some of Steem’s biggest abuse fighters for a talk about the state of the blockchain. We had @SteemCleaners’ founder @patrice, blacklist creator (and semi-regular guest) @themarkymark, our very own Anti-abuse category manager (and also @steemflagrewards powerhouse) @iamstan, @steemcleaners and Utopian abuse fighter @Naturicia, @steemcleaners abuse fighter and witness @guiltyparties, and @helpie founder and witness @meno. The discussion was lively, to say the least.